Bananas by Peter Chapman

Author:Peter Chapman [Chapman, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780802192004
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Published: 2009-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

8

On the Inside

United Fruit worked its way into the heart of US life, into the family and the affairs of state and, when it mattered most, into the State Department.

Since 1929 United Fruit’s education department had engaged in grabbing its audience while it was young. It sent maps for school geography lessons and pictures for kids to colour. Its ‘home economics department’ supplied a flow of material for mums. The ubiquitous sliced banana with cereal each morning became such a feature that some kids grew up believing the two just came that way. The fruit was certainly better suited to slicing on the morning cereal than apples were. United Fruit also harboured hopes that banana bread could outdo ‘apple pie’. Here the apple held firm, banana bread being far too heavy to displace it in the nation’s affections.

Winking bananas on the covers of booklets promised ‘new tempting ways’ to serve them: ‘bananas and bacon’, United Fruit suggested; chunks of the fruit wrapped and served on a cocktail stick were ‘guaranteed to start a conversation’; ‘serve them in some fashion – cooked or raw – at all meals’, ordered the company. This was, perhaps, wishful thinking given that hardly anyone outside the Caribbean knew how to cook bananas, and generally no one imported the type of banana suited to cooking anyway.

United Fruit’s pictures of Boy Scouts smiling round the campfire and throwing bananas in to be cooked gave the right impression of the company as one with the pillars of civil order. Its posters had bananas marching around like soldiers. Yet United Fruit wasn’t above messing with established protocols. Good mums enforced the rigid routine of three meals a day if possible and with nothing between them – ‘you’ll spoil your dinner’. But United Fruit sidled into the kitchen suggesting that the health-laden banana was above all that: it wasn’t enough just to have it at ‘all meals’ anymore; why not all day? ‘Give them to the kiddies’, the company said, ‘“between times”.’

United Fruit lived in a world of its own, both real and imagined, called ‘Banana Land’. It made programmes about it for the popular medium of the day, such as ‘Radio Bound for Banana Land’. Magazines picked up on the idea and promoted it. Short stories of minor intrigue were set on banana plantations, where men in high boots met scantily clad women. Dangerous work combined with easy living, with iced bourbon and inner reflections on the veranda when the day was done. The imperial British had Somerset Maugham in the Far East, sweating in the rubber of ‘Malaya’. United Fruit had Banana Land, somewhere down in the mystical south.

A fortunate few had been there. They went on the Great White Fleet from New Orleans to Cuba and beyond. Some Honduran ports were a little flea-bitten. Puerto Barrios in Guatemala was the worst, with its broken paths, ditches full of sewage ebbing and flowing with the tide. Did it ever go away? How did the people live in their corrugated tin and cardboard hovels? You’d never have imagined it like this on the radio.

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